Thomas Hobbes vs John Locke on the Red Button Blue Button Problem: Deterrence, Consent, and Who Decides
One philosopher would push the red button and call it the price of survival. The other wants to know who authorized the button in the first place. The meme is a joke. The question underneath it is not
Why This Topic
The red button versus blue button meme has been floating around the internet for years, but its underlying question is anything but trivial. At its core it is asking something that political philosophers have been arguing about since the seventeenth century: when the stakes are catastrophic, should authority be concentrated in one decisive hand, or constrained by consent and accountability? The meme just puts it in a format you can share.
We decided the best way into this question was through nuclear deterrence and executive power, because those are the places where the stakes are highest and the philosophical disagreement is sharpest. The meme’s framing is actually almost perfectly designed to expose the fault line between the two thinkers we chose. One of them would push the red button and tell you it was the only rational choice. The other would want to know who authorized the button and whether the authorization was legitimate, possibly before the window to act had closed.
We find that genuinely funny. We also find it genuinely important. The two are not incompatible.
Why Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War, which he had spent partly in self-imposed exile in Paris, partly watching a country tear itself apart in the absence of settled sovereign authority. That experience shapes everything he wrote. For Hobbes, the state of nature, the condition of human beings without a powerful sovereign to enforce order, is not a romantic starting point. It is a catastrophe. His famous phrase is that life there is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
From that starting point, the logic of deterrence is almost automatic. Nations exist relative to each other in precisely the state of nature Hobbes describes for individuals: there is no world government with the authority to enforce peace between them. The only reliable guarantor of peace is therefore the credible threat of overwhelming response. A sovereign who holds that threat and is genuinely believed to be willing to use it is not a monster. He is, in Hobbesian terms, doing exactly what a sovereign is for.
Hobbes wrote directly about the relationship between sovereign authority and the capacity for decisive violence. In Leviathan he is explicit that the sovereign must hold the sword, not as one option among many, but as the essential instrument of the entire arrangement. Distribute the sword and you have not created a safer system. You have created a slower one, which in a crisis is the same as a broken one.
Why John Locke
John Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government around 1680, though they were published in 1689 in the wake of the Glorious Revolution that had just removed James II from the throne. Locke was writing, in part, to justify what had happened. But he was also articulating something he had believed for years: that government is a trust, not a grant of unlimited authority.
For Locke, the people do not surrender their rights to a sovereign. They delegate specific powers for specific purposes, primarily the protection of life, liberty, and property. When a government acts outside those purposes, or concentrates power in ways the people never consented to, the trust is broken. The people retain the right to revoke it. No government holds legitimate authority to make irreversible choices that affect all of humanity without anything approaching consent from the people whose lives are at stake.
Locke spent years in exile in the Netherlands because his views made the authorities of his day uncomfortable. This is not incidental biographical detail. It is evidence of a man who understood firsthand what concentrated sovereign power looked like from the losing end, and who drew careful conclusions from the experience. His First Treatise is a detailed demolition of the divine right of kings. His Second Treatise is the positive case for what legitimate authority should look like instead. Both are directly relevant to the question of who should hold the red button.
Who Else We Considered
Jean-Jacques Rousseau as Locke’s replacement. Rousseau would have taken the critique of concentrated power in a different and arguably more radical direction. Where Locke argues for constrained government with proper institutional limits, Rousseau would have questioned the entire framework of representative sovereignty and argued for something closer to direct popular will. The problem is that Rousseau’s general will is famously difficult to operationalize, and a debate in which Hobbes says the sovereign needs the button and Rousseau says the people collectively need the button would have required a third interlocutor just to point out that no one has explained how the people collectively push anything in under thirty seconds.
Niccolo Machiavelli as Hobbes’s replacement. Machiavelli would have been an interesting alternative because he is, in some ways, the spiritual ancestor of Hobbes on questions of executive power and the necessity of decisive force. But Machiavelli’s framework is primarily about princes maintaining power rather than about the philosophical foundations of sovereignty, and we have used him in several recent episodes. Hobbes gave us a richer theoretical foundation for the deterrence argument and more explicit text to draw on about the nature of sovereign authority.
Carl von Clausewitz as the military dimension. Clausewitz on war as the continuation of politics by other means would have been a compelling angle, but Clausewitz is primarily a theorist of warfare rather than a theorist of political authority, and the debate would have drifted toward military strategy rather than the philosophical question of who legitimately holds catastrophic power. We have a Clausewitz episode already in the back catalog, and we want to keep his appearances anchored to debates where military theory is the primary frame.
Edmund Burke as a conservative counterweight to Locke. Burke would have argued for caution and the value of inherited institutions over abstract principles of consent, which would have given the debate a different texture. But Burke and Hobbes, both skeptical of abstract rationalism in politics, would have had a harder time generating genuine conflict. The Hobbes and Locke opposition is cleaner, and the comedy potential of a man who finds the state of nature darkly hilarious arguing with a man who has constructed a very elaborate argument for why we need not accept it was too good to pass up.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Hobbes’s support for concentrated executive authority, including the authority to deploy catastrophic force, flows directly and necessarily from his account of the state of nature. If you accept that the condition of human beings without a sovereign is genuinely as bad as Hobbes describes, then any sovereign capable of preventing that condition is preferable to none. The arithmetic is brutal but internally consistent. A world with a red button held by a powerful sovereign is a world where the sovereign’s credible willingness to use it prevents the war of all against all from breaking out. A world where no sovereign holds that button, or where the authority to use it is fragmented and conditional, is a world where adversaries calculate that the button will not be pushed in time, or at all, and act accordingly.
Hobbes is not naive about sovereign abuse. He acknowledges in Leviathan that a sovereign can be tyrannical. But he argues that even a tyrannical sovereign is preferable to the chaos of no sovereign, because tyranny, however awful, is at least stable. The suffering under a bad sovereign is predictable and bounded. The suffering in a state of nature is unpredictable and unbounded. This is the calculation Hobbes is asking you to accept, and it is worth noting that he is not wrong about the historical record of what happens to societies when sovereign authority collapses.
Locke’s position flows just as necessarily from his account of what government is for. If government exists solely to protect life, liberty, and property, and derives its authority from the ongoing consent of the governed, then there are hard limits on what any government can legitimately do. Concentrating catastrophic power in a single hand without meaningful accountability is not merely imprudent. It is a violation of the fundamental terms of the arrangement. The people never consented to give one person the authority to make an irreversible decision on behalf of all of humanity. Any government that acts as if they did has already broken the trust that made it legitimate.
Where Locke concedes some ground, and this comes through in the debate, is on the question of how accountability actually works in practice when the window for action is narrow. He does not pretend that deliberative consent is fast. He argues that the alternative, unchecked authority in a single hand, is more dangerous in the long run than the speed disadvantage in any particular crisis. Whether you find that persuasive probably depends on how seriously you take the possibility that the person holding the button might not be acting in your interests, which is a question Locke thinks you should take very seriously and Hobbes thinks you should set aside in favor of the question of whether anyone has the button at all.
A Note on the Sources
The primary texts for this debate are Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, published in 1651, and the Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, published in 1689. Both are available in their original form, and both are worth reading in full if you want to understand how carefully each man constructed his case.
Hobbes’s voice in Leviathan is direct to the point of being blunt. He does not soften his conclusions. One of the most striking passages is his description of the state of nature: he builds a long list of everything civilization provides, industry, culture, navigation, building, before concluding with the phrase that has followed him ever since. He wants you to understand exactly what you are giving up when sovereign authority fails, so that the cost of the alternative is perfectly clear.
Locke’s voice is more careful and more hedged, which some readers find frustrating and others find appropriately cautious given the stakes. His account of the social contract in the Second Treatise is built argument by argument, anticipating objections and responding to them before they can be raised. The passage that most directly applies to the red button debate is his discussion of prerogative power, the authority a sovereign holds to act quickly in emergencies without prior legislative approval. Locke accepts that prerogative is sometimes necessary. But he insists that it must be exercised in the public good and remains subject to the judgment of the community after the fact. Hobbes would call this the same thing with extra steps. Locke would call it the difference between legitimate authority and tyranny.
The historical record on which both men were drawing is, of course, the chaos and violence of seventeenth-century English politics, which gave both of them ample evidence for their respective theories, just organized differently.
What Comes Next
We have Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on record now, and both of them have strong positions on questions that will come up again. We have been holding the Hamilton versus Madison debate on presidential removal power for when the right news moment arrives, and that one is going to revisit some of the same questions about executive authority that this debate raises, from inside the American constitutional tradition rather than from the seventeenth-century English one.
We are also looking at Adam Smith versus Friedrich List on birthright citizenship from an economic angle, and Bryan versus Spencer on AI monopoly concentration. Both are in development.
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